Hélène Simoneau Danse
Mimi Ohio Theatre at Playhouse Square
Cleveland, Ohio
November 9, 2024

By Steve Sucato

Power dynamics served as a throughline in two meticulously crafted dance works presented by Hélène Simoneau Danse Saturday night at Playhouse Square’s Mimi Ohio Theatre. 

Co-presented by DanceCleveland and Tri-C Performing Arts, the Cleveland debut of the Montréal, Canada, project-based dance company opened with French-Canadian choreographer/director Hélène Simoneau’s new work-in-progress “Late Bloomer.”

Partially developed during residencies at The National Center for Choreography in Akron and Massachusetts’ Jacobs Pillow, the new work for six dancers will be further developed in an upcoming residency at Canada’s Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. 

Performed to ambient original music by Puerto Rican-born composer and multi-instrumentalist Angélica Negrón, Simoneau says the work was inspired by the power of belonging and fitting in. 

It began with a cloud of fog hovering over an empty stage. Two dancers then appeared from a side wing, arms outstretched and locked in opposition to one another, moving horizontally across the stage. One dancer walked backward as if trying to hold back the other. More dancer pairings then appeared, moving in the same manner across the stage. Soon after, one of the dancers being pushed backward fell to the stage floor. Her partner then grabbed ahold of the back of her head and began pushing it down with the intent of smashing her face into the floor. It was a disturbing scene in the largely abstract work where the dancers appeared devoid of emotional expression.

Costumed in loose-fitting pants and white tops, the cast moved through Simoneau’s detailed, nuanced, and geometric post-modern/contemporary choreography in varying dancer pairings and movement patterns that came and went throughout the work.

In one section that began in silence, petite dancer Frances Lorraine Samson performed an engaging solo, twisting and turning her body before the metronomic sounds of bells ushered in the rest of the cast, moving in a horizontal line across the rear of the stage. Each dancer walked slightly hunched over, their arms out in front of them, one curved above the other as if an imaginary beach ball was wedged in the space between them.

With the gentle, flowing quality of a Tai Chi kata, the dancers performed Simoneau’s cerebral choreography with precision and intent. 

As the work progressed, a black rear stage curtain slowly lowered, darkening the mood of the piece, and Negrón’s music switched in tempo to driving electronic dance club music. The dancers’ movements also shifted to being more angular and back and forth with slashing arms and side bends of the body.

“Late Bloomer” ended with the dancers in a rapid-fire hip-shaking unison group sequence and then shuffling in a line sideways to exit stage left.

The program’s final offering was Simoneau’s “Delicate Power.” Also, an exploration of the many ways we use power, the 2022 dance work for seven women was created during the global pandemic and was similar in choreographic structure and movement quality to “Late Bloomer.”

Set to an original score by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw; the piece was a succession of clever idiosyncratic dance phrases delivered by the dancers that played out like a combination of a Merce Cunningham and Doug Varone work in its movement specificity and flow of bodies across the stage.

Dancing to Shaw’s electronically-enhanced oo’s and ah’s vocalizations in her music, the dancers stood, sat, turned, and kicked legs and thrust arms upward. More subtle in its representations of power dynamics in the choreography, the work’s meditative unison choreography revealed the kind of beauty found in a mathematical equation: elegantly structured and infinitely complex. But like a grand equation covering multiple chalkboards, there were times when the dancing offered little variety, and viewer fatigue set in. Despite those moments, “Delicate Power” was a mesmerizing dance work with a killer score, wonderfully integrated lighting effects, and adroit dancing by its cast. Its pista resistance came in a frenetic solo performed by dancer Jie-Hung Connie Shiau near its end. Shiau marvelously rifled through sharp, punctuated movement that quickly covered space and seemed to encapsulate in brief all that came before it in the work.

Having followed Simoneau’s work and career for many years, her company’s performance Saturday night had the feel of a dance creator and company being on the cusp of something greater soon to follow. Hopefully, the company will be back in Cleveland in the future for audiences to bear witness to that.